Welcome to Debian Science!

[Dirk Eddelbuettel <edd@debian.org>]

Hola,

Helen wrote (and I cut and paste as I wasn't subsribed then, and reindent):

  - the possibility to build a CDD for science, so that I could hand it to
    a colleague or a student, and they could easily install a Debian System 
    (maybe even a LiveCD) that would include all of the software they need 
    for their research

Quite right! I don't mean to sound preposterous, but that is exactly one of
the reasons I created Quantian a good thirty months ago. Since then, I made a
fair number of releases, and garnered a fair amount of mind share. See

   http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/quantian

and/or Google for Quantian. 

When I started this, CDD had not yet seen more than Andreas's slides, and I
just wanted to a) get on and get releases out to see how this would work, and
b) base it on Knoppix (and later clusterKnoppix to get openMosix support). 

But the time may be right for merging at least parts of this back. Science /
math / numerics / ... packages come in all the time, and a more coordinated
editing process (as in the publishing sense of editing) may be appropriate to
define a core set. So I'd love to part of this, and be happy to contribute
what I can my Quantian's end.

If folks have thoughts on how to maintain parallel tracks of a "science"
install as well as live cdrom, I'd be all ears. The last Quantian release in
December was a 2 gb compressed iso, it expands to around 6.5 gb.  When Klaus
asked for software recommendations for Knoppix 4.0, I sent him my list of
packages and some parts have been integrated into Knoppix 4.0, as I
understand it (not having seen that iso yet).  Staying on cdrom size is
really, really tough.  Maybe we should think in terms of dvds.

Anyway, enough of a ramble -- thanks to all at Debconf to get this started.

Cheers, Dirk

PS Thanks also to Andre for passing word of this list to debian-octave. While
   I no longer maintain the ten or so Debian packages I once had, my total
   package count is still at around 70 due to a number of R and other
   packages. And OMG I missed the 27th -- my ten year anniversary of my first
   Debian package upload. 

-- 
Statistics: The (futile) attempt to offer certainty about uncertainty.
         -- Roger Koenker, 'Dictionary of Received Ideas of Statistics'